This is something of a concept album. It’s also a programme that has
been toured and performed in concert many times and reaches fruition as a
disc. It takes Elizabethan and Jacobean lute music and marries it to the poetry
and theatre of the time. Sometimes a single track is given over to verse or
a short scene from a play, spoken by Robert Aubry Davis; but also we hear
a speech or lyric spoken above, as it were, lute accompaniment. This sometimes
makes things difficult to judge artistically vis a vis Ronn McFarlane’s
lute playing, but it’s a disc to be measured against a rather wider
canvass than usual, a multi-disciplinary words and music presentation.

Most of the music is by Dowland, but there is one piece by Campion, another
by Byrd and others by our old pal, Anonymous. The theatrical performances
derive from Shakespeare - Henry VIII, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen
of Verona - as well as Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness.
There are poems by Wyatt, with which we begin and end, Robert Herrick and
Samuel Daniel. Thomas D’Urfey’s wickedly naughty The Wanton
Trick is here too.

As an example of a theatrical presentation it works well. Whether it has longevity
on disc is a moot point, because some of the extracts are very brief, and
also because the lute, played behind the voice, is demonstrably there for
evocative effect. Ronn McFarlane has a number of discs to his name of lute
music and is indeed a fine player. There are times when he inclined to the
brusque and overly metrical - one thinks of Mrs Winter’s Jump
for example; the woman in question must have been quite a motoric figure if
his playing is anything to go by. Nigel North, in his complete Dowland set
for Naxos, is altogether more pliant and refined. This element of impatience
also seems to me slightly to limit appreciation of Lord Willoughby’s
Welcome Home; I admire the verve but it lacks North’s sense of colour.
Nor in truth does he possess the clarity of North in the ‘tremolo’
study that is A Fancy.
Next we have the spoken element. The method in the Wyatt ‘title track’,
and others, is this. Davis speaks the first stanza, and then McFarlane joins
in behind him. Note though that they were separately recorded. Apart from
a tendency to pronounce the word ‘tunes’ as ‘toons’
his reading of the poem is good, but the other Wyatt setting, of My Lute
Awakes is infuriatingly mannered. Elsewhere he batters Like as the
Lute through constant over-emphases, and in the Campion pronounces ‘doth’
to rhyme with cloth. Is this an American thing? But the apogee for thrice
named Robert Aubry Davis occurs in the Shrew scene, where he contrives
to turn Hortensio into a cross between Sir Harry Lauder and Dame Margaret
Rutherford (and not in a good way). Quite where he dredged up this bizarre
accent beats me. It’s a shame because he can do a perfectly reasonable
English accent with verve, as he does in the D’Urfey.

The texts are printed in full, and the booklet has been nicely designed and
amusingly written (by Davis). Indeed the disc is cleverly programmed. It’s
not for me, though.